And the dynamic shift wasinsane.
Watching Luka Petrov kiss Octavia Moreau from a distance of approximately eighteen inches was like having a front-row seat at a production that hadn’t been rehearsed but moved with the precision of a show that had been running for years. The energy between them was electric—not the tentative, exploratory current that she and I had been generating, but a fully powered, infrastructure-grade voltage that lit up the room and left everything adjacent to it vibrating. His mouth consumed hers with a hunger that was both brutal and tender—the paradox of a man who wanted to devour the woman in front of him and protect her simultaneously, and who had resolved the contradiction by doing both at once.
Her body arched into his. The hand that had been on my chest migrated to the back of his neck, her fingers threading into the dark navy-purple strands and gripping with a force that I could see in the whitening of her knuckles. His free hand found her hip—not gently, not carefully, with the possessive, full-palm grip of an Alpha reclaiming territory he considered his.
These two.
The chemistry between them isn’t chemistry. It’s a natural disaster. A controlled demolition that isn’t controlled. The kind of connection that makes everyone in the blast radius either uncomfortable or envious, and I’m discovering, lying beneath the woman who’s being kissed by the man who’d kill me for touching her, that I’m the second one.
Envious.
Not of either of them specifically. Of the thing between them. The sizzling, intense, stupidly confident energy of two people who know each other’s bodies like they know their own choreography and can perform the routine from memory even after five years of separation. I’ve satisfied myself with random Omegas to keep the biological imperative managed. I’ve played checkers in bedrooms the way I play it on the ice—strategically, efficiently, moving to the next game before the current one has time to develop emotional stakes.
But this. To have a connection like THIS—one that craves you back, that meets your intensity and matches it and raises it and turns the bedroom into a competition neither person is willing to lose—I want that. The same way I want Olympic ice. The same way I want gold. With the specific, bone-level, refusing-to-accept-an-alternative desire of a man who has just discovered what he’s been settling for by discovering what he’s been missing.
They broke the kiss. Luka’s forehead rested against hers. Both breathing hard. Both flushed. The scent in the room had escalated to a concentration that was making my vision swim—his stone-and-clove-and-chocolate layered over her heat-amplified sweetness, the combined output producing an olfactory environment that felt less like air and more like liquid.
“If I join,” Luka said, his voice low, rough, carrying the specific ragged edge of a man negotiating the terms of his own surrender, “you’re going to be a good girl and work this pretty ass of yours?”
She grinned against his lips. Didn’t answer. The silence was deliberate—a refusal to confirm, a power play, the specific act of withholding compliance from an Alpha who had asked for it and who would need to earn it through means other than words.
His hand tightened around her throat. The grip compressing by a degree—the physical punctuation of a man who recognized the game and was choosing to play it rather than circumvent it.
“Stubborn,” he huffed against her mouth. The word carried affection. Exasperation. The specific, resigned admiration of a man who had been dealing with this particular brand of defiance for years and wouldn’t trade it for the easiest compliance on earth.
He pulled back. Looked at me.
Green eyes meeting mine across the landscape of the woman between us. The territorial fury had receded—not vanished, not resolved, but banked. Contained. Replaced by the more complex expression of a man who was assessing the situation with the strategic, real-time analysis that made him lethal in the crease and was now applying those skills to a context that required a different kind of save.
“Want me to join?” His voice was level. Direct. Offering the question without pressure, without assumption. “Not sure if you’re used to a threesome.”
Right. That’s what this would be called. The word that my brain had been avoiding by categorizing the situation as “unprecedented” and “logistically complex” when the accurate descriptor was significantly simpler and had been staring me in the face since the moment Octavia had climbed onto my chest and declared me incapable of handling what she was offering.
I nodded. Slowly. The motion carrying the honest, measured weight of a man who was saying yes to an experience he’d had before but never at this caliber.
“Experienced it before,” I said. “But you two are…” I searched for the word. Discarded six options that were too mild and three that were too clinical. “Way more connected than the average.”
Luka’s smirk appeared. The real one—the quarter-turn, eyes-included, Diamond-specific version that I’d seen him deploy in Octavia’s direction and was now, for the first time, being aimed at me. Not with the same warmth. Not with the same intimacy. But with a shared understanding—the brief, acknowledging look of a man who recognized that the person he was looking at had just identified a truth and was choosing to respect the observation rather than dismiss it.
“Glad our chemistry is noticeable,” he said. The smirk widened. The green eyes darkened by a shade that had nothing to do with the lighting and everything to do with the anticipatory, coiled energy of an Alpha who had just been given clearance to enter the play. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you, though.”
Luka didn’t wait for me to finish the sentence.
He looked at Octavia first—green eyes locking onto storm-gray with the kind of silent communion that made the rest of the room feel like background noise. Then he leaned in, lips brushing the shell of her ear, voice pitched low enough that the words were meant for her alone yet carried just far enough for me to catch every syllable.
“Want to enjoy sucking his cock first?”
The question landed like a perfectly placed pass—clean, intentional, setting up the next play before the defense even registered the puck was moving. Octavia’s grin bloomedslow and wicked, the kind of smile that belonged on the victory podium after a flawless free skate.
Her eyes met mine across the narrow space between us, and the hunger in them hit like a body check I hadn’t seen coming. That same raw, unfiltered need I’d glimpsed when she’d practically climbed Luka the moment we’d crossed the threshold of this house—back when the preheat had still been building and the guest room door had slammed shut behind them with the finality of a championship buzzer.
Luka remembered it too.
I could see it in the subtle flex of his jaw, the way his hand stayed possessively curved around the side of her neck. Kael’s house. Closest to campus. Very few people ever stepped foot inside the captain’s private sanctuary, yet here we were—Luka moving through it like he’d memorized the floor plan years ago. The realization settled in my gut with the weight of a verified fact: these two had history that ran deeper than locker-room rumors.History that explained why the goaltender had transferred in mid-season and why the captain’s rut blockers were working overtime upstairs.
But right now, none of that mattered.
Octavia slid down my body with the fluid grace of a woman who had spent two decades turning her core into a weapon. Her fingers—strong, callused from years of gripping skate blades and partner lifts—wrapped around my shaft with confident, unhurried pressure.
